No Pride Without Abolition with Eric A. Stanley and Ash Williams (online)

Thursday June 30 2022 630PM ET

Firestorm Books and Coffee

More info here.

Eric A. Stanley “Atmospheres of Violence” in conversation with Jamie Grace (in person)

Saturday, July 2nd 2022 1 PM

Red Emma’s Baltimore, MD

more info here

Eric A. Stanley “Atmospheres of Violence” in conversation with Eli Coston and Travis Williams (in person)

Thursday, July 7, 2022 7 PM

Small Friend Records and Books

more info here

• Read an interview with Eric A. Stanley in the Black Agenda Report.
• Listen to an interview with Eric Stanley on Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
• Listen to an interview with Eric A. Stanley on KPFA’s Against the Grain.
• Listen to an interview with Eric Stanley on The Final Straw
• Listen to an Interview with Eric Stanley on WORT Nine FM
• Read a Visual Interview with Eric Stanley on UC Berkeley’s Matrix

Register here

Advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past—marriage equality, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation—have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence, theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the United States. Rather than suggesting that such violence is evidence of individual phobias, Stanley shows how it is a structuring antagonism in our social world. Drawing on an archive of suicide notes, AIDS activist histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews, they offer a theory of anti-trans/queer violence in which inclusion and recognition are forms of harm rather than remedies to it. In calling for trans/queer organizing and worldmaking beyond these forms, Stanley points to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures.

“Eric A. Stanley’s Atmospheres of Violence animates trans/queer, young queer, and racially dominated lives never quite stamped out by a brittle white supremacist egosystem. Written with tenderness and passionate thunder, the book’s brilliant storytelling circulates grief and hope for the governed who remain alive and ungovernable. Throughout, Stanley offers vital pedagogies of truancy and wicked survival for potential collective life.” — Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism

“Atmospheres of Violence offers a generous and generative reminder that queer and trans lives have always been bigger and more brilliant than the deadly state that tries to frighten and cajole us. Out of a devastating archive, Eric A. Stanley’s queer and trans stories rise beyond assimilation, honoring our gorgeous survival and refusals as resistance.” — Tourmaline, artist, activist, and writer

Available from Duke University Press September 2021.

Out October 2017, Trap Doors: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press), edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley and Johanna Burton. With writing/ thinking/ art by Lexi Adsit, Sara Ahmed, Nicole Archer, Kai Lumumba Barrow, Johanna Burton, micha cárdenas, Mel Y. Chen, Grace Dunham, Treva Ellison, Sydney Freeland, Che Gossett, Reina Gossett, Stamatina Gregory, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Robert Hamblin, Eva Hayward, Juliana Huxtable, Yve Laris Cohen, Abram J. Lewis, Heather Love, Park McArthur, CeCe McDonald, Toshio Meronek, Fred Moten, Tavia Nyong’o, Morgan M. Page, Roy Pérez, Dean Spade, Eric A. Stanley, Jeannine Tang, Wu Tsang, Jeanne Vaccaro, Chris E. Vargas, Geo Wyeth, Kalaniopua Young, Constantina Zavitsanos.

Check out two new reviews of the second edition of Captive Genders. The first is O’Brien on Stanley and Smith, ‘Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex’ by Michelle E. O’Brien and the second is The Forgotten Ones: Queer and Trans Lives in the Prison System by Grace Dunham which appears in The New Yorker.

Chris Vargas and I will be screening Criminal Queers at the University of Chicago on Thursday, February 25, 2016, 7:00 PM at the Logan Center, Screening Room 201. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a conversation with Chris, Eric and Professor Lauren Berlant.

On April 9, 2016 I will be giving the keynote address for Queer Death, De(con)struction, and Contagion: Affective Rhythms in Interdisciplinary Studies the inaugural  Queer Studies Symposium at the University of California, Merced.

I will be joining Craig Willse for the plenary session of the DC Queer Studies symposium Queer Beyond Repair at the University of Maryland, College Park April 22, 2016.